Scrooge and Nero

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 342, 11 January 1946, Page 8

Scrooge and Nero

BOTH the plays selected by 3YA for Christmas broadcasting were American recordings. I wish I could say that either was successful. The first was a version of Dickens’ Christmas Carol with Ronald Colman, whom ordinarily I heartily admire, as Scrooge. This failed in many different ways: I fear that Dickens is too essentially the Londoner to go into an American accent; nor is "Christmas Carol," the crowd scenes and descriptive passages of which are so much the soul of the book as at times to overshadow the plot, really suitable for radio-dramatisation; the idea of Scrooge recounting his own redemption would fetch Dickens roaring out of the grave. The other play was Norman Corwin’s "The Plot to Overthrow Christmas," which gives the impression chiefly of opportunities lost. It was a noble idea to depict a congress of fiends plotting the downfall of the festival, but so rich a collection of individualists as Ivan the Terrible, Haman, Simon Legree, and Nero should have been endowed with a far greater diversity of personality and not presented as a collection of retired bootleggers. And Nero’s final conversion to the side of the angels by the eloquence of Santa Claus was singularly unconvincing, . ;